When Bush Does It, It's Dictatorial Overreach. When Obama Does It, It's Constitutional Strangeness...

The idea that Barack Obama has no problems targeting American citizens for assassination brings out an uncalled for level of fatuity in Matt Yglesias:

If the President wants to do something like implement a domestic policy proposal he campaigned on—charge polluters for global warming emissions, for example—he faces a lot of hurdles. He needs majority support on a House committee or three. He also needs majority support on a Senate committee or three. Then he needs to get a majority in the full House of Representatives. And then he needs to de facto needs a 60 percent supermajority in the Senate. And then it’s all subject to judicial review.

But if Scooter Libby obstructs justice, the president has an un-reviewable, un-checkable power to offer him a pardon or clemency. If Bill Clinton wants to bomb Serbia, then Serbia gets bombed. If George W Bush wants to hold people in secret prisons and torture them, then tortured they shall be. And if Barack Obama wants to issue a kill order on someone or other, then the order goes out. And if Congress actually wants to remove a president from office, it faces extremely high barriers to doing so.

Whether or not you approve of this sort of executive power in the security domain, it’s a bit of a weird mismatch. You would think that it’s in the field of inflicting violence that we would want the most institutional restraint. Instead, the president faces almost no de facto constraints on his deployment of surveillance, military, and intelligence authority but extremely tight constraint on his ability to implement the main elements of the his domestic policy agenda. I think it’s telling that the US has generally not advised countries engaged in a democratic transition (think Germany and Japan after WWII or Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, etc. after the fall of Communism) to imitate our form of government.

Other than demonstrating a utter lack of knowledge about what the U.S. did do in Germany and Japan after World War Two, Yglesias does little more than blame Obama's War on Terror policies that he finds objectionable on the Constitution. It's the ultimate Progressive's excuse: The Constitution failed, not Obama.

In fact, Matt seems to be more upset that he won't be seeing any of Obama's more unpopular policies - such as health care reform and tap-and-trade - become law than by the idea that President Obama has approved a "kill on sight" policy towards certain citizens as a part of the War on Terror. This is totally wrong but completely understandable: Eight years of dictatorial overreach by the Bush Regime has left Democrats, Liberals and Progressives numbed to the essential evil of the sort of policies they once so forcefully denounced. Those years blurred the line between Good and Evil, and was all part of the Bush/Cheney Master Plan.

So you see, it's still all Bush's fault. And not the Constitution's.

Glad I could clear that up for you, Matt.

Note: Little Matty has been at the forefront of Progressive musing about just how, well, badly designed our Constitution really is. You see, in his eyes health care reform didn't die due to a thousand Obama/Democratic fuckups, it died because the framers of the Constitution didn't get it quite right. I find this attitude aggravating when coming from a 20-something punk with a degree in Philosophy, which is what Matty is. Read enough of the boy and you'll get the sense that Yglesias regrets not being around during the first seven days, because had he been there, he'd have been able to pass along a number of useful insights and helpful tips to God.

Comments

[David]

And then there's this nugget:

"You would think that it’s in the field of inflicting violence that we would want the most institutional restraint."

Uh, no, you wouldn't. This also ignores what we did during WWII in Europe and the Pacific, and under what type of circumstances Americans fight best.
What is "institutional restraint" in this context anyway, besides what already exists?

I suspect Matt's another guy you'd not want to go tiger hunting with. Ah, I remember when Harvard was a good school. Oh wait: no I don't!

[Simon]

Doesn't the constitution give Congress the power to declare war (Section 8), and isn't it Congress which has been basically giving up that right in the last few years (eg the Iraq Resolution) because it is too venal to risk making a decision in case it turns out to be a bad call (see Clinton, Hilary) ?

Shouldn't Iglesias' article be titled "Our Strange Congress" ?

[Savious]

The executive powers like the overseas Americans hunted by their own government is the tripled foreign aid Obama ordered and Biden had done with loan write offs. There is way too much free American money and it's just printed and sent out electronically overseas. The economy won't recover. Bad Americans overseas taken care of by us. Obama.

[Eric Blair]

"Read enough of the boy and you'll get the sense that Yglesias regrets not being around during the first seven days, because had he been there, he'd have been able to pass along a number of useful insights and helpful tips to God."

Dennis, I'm gonna steal that.

[Tom Maguire]

Re: "Read enough of the boy..." - I may steal it first.

[David]

Matty is the the reason the stereotype of the preening, faux-intellectual baby Harvard grad was invented.

[David]

Matt posted this in a followup:

"My take on this is that I’m not a lawyer and I don’t try to give legal opinions about what’s “really” permitted and not permitted by the constitution."

2 things:

[David]

1) Ya think Matt might not be a lawyer? Maybe?

2) #2 is pure b.s. Of course he's rendering those opinions.

You can't get the truth from people like Matt. Maybe I lack the Harvard nuance.

[Simon]

He probably should have said that he didn't know what he was talking about before giving a wrong opinion.

I am an Australian with no knowledge of the US Constitution and it took me 5 minutes on Wikipedia to work out that he'd got it wrong.